While still short of being entirely mainstream there does appear to be a growing recognition in both
policy circles and academia that economic development is not brought about by autonomous profitmaximising
agents interacting anonymously through equilibrium markets.1 Rather, economic
development is an inherently disequilibric process involving interactive and institutionally
embedded processes in broader systems of firms, governments, research centres, universities,
consultants, and other entities. These systems can tap into stocks of global knowledge and
technologies, assimilate and adapt it to local circumstances, and create new knowledge or
technologies.
Such broader production systems are conceptualised in several different ways in the literature,
e.g. Lundvall et al.’s ‘national innovation systems’, Richard Whitley’s ‘business systems’, and
Sanjaya Lall’s concept of ‘industrial technology development’. This paper identifies and outlines
four different systemic approaches to economic development. All four approaches have primarily
been developed to address nationally based institutional systems in advanced economies.
Both the ontological premises and the policy implications of these systemic approaches depart
distinctly from the conventional orthodoxy on economic development as articulated in the
‘Washington Consensus’ and its later derivatives. The article goes on to explore which policy
implications the adoption of such a systemic view might have for the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development (NEPAD).